Cancelling Weyl anomaly from position dependent coupling

Abstract

Once we put a quantum field theory on a curved manifold, it is natural to further assume that coupling constants are position dependent. The position dependent coupling constants then provide an extra contribution to the Weyl anomaly so that we may attempt to cancel the entire Weyl anomaly on the curved manifold. We show that such a cancellation is possible for constant Weyl transformation or infinitesimal but generic Weyl transformation in two and four dimensional conformal field theories with exactly marginal deformations. When the Weyl scaling factor is annihilated by conformal powers of Laplacian (e.g. by Fradkin-Tseytlin-Riegert-Paneitz operator in four dimensions), the cancellation persists even at the finite order thanks to a nice mathematical property of the $Q$-curvature under the Weyl transformation.